There was no European-wide wave of protest triggered by the Great Recession. Instead, a protest wave swept across southern Europe, which was, however, mainly due to the developments in Greece. In Greece, the crisis gave rise to a sustained wave of protest that covered both the shock- and the Euro-crisis period. But even in the case of Greece, this wave had already been under way once the economic crisis really hit the country. Moreover, while the crisis also gave rise to protest waves in Cyprus, Portugal, and Spain during the Euro-crisis, it did not do so in all southern European countries. There were no waves to speak of in Italy and Malta during any part of the Great Recession. In north-western Europe, with the exception of Iceland and the UK, protest seems to have developed largely independently of the economic crisis, while we have found some country-specific waves in central- and eastern Europe. But the eastern European waves, too, had either already accelerated before the intervention of the Great Recession, which only contributed to their peaks (Latvia, Lithuania), delayed their decline (Czech Republic, Hungary), or was actually unrelated to the protest (Bulgaria, Estonia). A lot of protest during the Great Recession responded to country-specific conditions which were entirely unrelated to the crisis.

The chapter establishes that economic and political grievances matter for economic protest in general and public economic protest in particular. In addition, it shows that, during the period covered, political grievances have been strongly influenced by economic grievances across Europe, but most clearly in southern Europe. While the rapid recovery of the countries of north-western Europe and the pain tolerance in the countries of central and eastern Europe probably served to limit the impact of the economic grievances on political dissatisfaction, the fact that the southern European countries not only were hard hit by the economic crisis, but also experienced a relative decline with regard to the other parts of Europe, most likely enhanced the impact of economic on political grievances in this part of Europe. Moreover, it is also above all in southern Europe that the effect of economic on political grievances was conditioned by state capacity and IMF interventions: while weak state capacity enhanced the effect of the former on the latter, IMF interventions attenuated it. Finally, a core finding of this chapter is that economic protest was most heavily influenced by the joint effect of economic and political grievances. Protest mobilization was particularly pronounced whenever dire economic conditions and dissatisfaction with the political system rose together and reinforced each other.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.

This chapter summarizes the results and concludes by pointing out two limitations of the volume. Overall continuity has prevailed in the protest arena during the Great Recession. Neither during the shock period nor during the period of the Euro-crisis has this deep economic crisis led to a general return of economic protest across Europe, nor has it led to a transformation of the action repertoire of the protestors in the streets. Southern Europe has been different, because it experienced a double crisis – economic and political, which expressed itself in a tremendous wave of protest above all in Greece, but also in Spain and to a lesser extent in Portugal. In Italy, we saw more of the business as usual that characterized the protest arena in the rest of Europe. The main effect of the protest wave that swept through southern Europe has been the transformation of the party systems in the respective countries. New challenger parties rose up, party systems fragmented and coalition formation became difficult. The focus of the volume on protest in the streets is limited in two respects: On the one hand, with the rise of new challenger parties from the left and the right, protest politics are shifting into the electoral arena, which we have not analysed in this volume. On the other hand, protest politics may be increasingly influenced by the new opportunity structure provided by the information communication technologies (ICTs), which was not the focus of our study either.

This chapter links the political consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the electoral and protest arena. Therefore, this chapter combines the literature on economic voting with social movement research. It argues that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision-makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilization should thus amplify the impact of economic hardship on electoral punishment. The empirical analysis to study this relationship combines the data on protest with a dataset of electoral outcomes in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and that protests contributed to the destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession.